Politics

Let's Talk Global Warming

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

April 3, 2001 / 1:58 PM EDT / CBS

European leaders are trying to salvage a 1997 agreement for reducing global warming despite President Bush's declaration that its mandatory cuts on carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and short timetable are no longer acceptable to the United States.

Ambassadors from the 15-nation European Union were meeting Tuesday with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Whitman and other administration officials.

The EU leaders will also confer with three Democratic Senators: Joseph Lieberman, Joseph Biden and John Kerry.

Whitman, after attending a conference on global warming in Italy, warned President Bush last month that the issue was a matter of "international credibility."

The president, nonetheless, reversed a campaign pledge to treat carbon dioxide from power plants as a pollutant and said the reductions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases called for in the 1997 treaty were too expensive to implement.

The administration said it instead will seek an alternative that would include poorer, underdeveloped countries now exempt from treaty commitments.

No industrial country has yet ratified the treaty negotiated four years ago in Kyoto, Japan. An effort last November at The Hague to come up with a plan for implementing the accord collapsed in a disagreement between the United States and Germany over trading pollution credits.

Led by Kjell Larsson, Sweden's environment minister, and Margot Wallstroem, the EU's environment commissioner, the delegation hopes to revive momentum for the Kyoto accord. It also plans to travel to China, Russia, Iran and Japan to seek support for keeping the treaty alive.

"If the United States leaves this process, doesn't want to be a part of the united effort, than I think many people will look upon that as some kind of arrogance," Larsson told reporters.

Pacific Rim leaders meanwhile are weighing in with their views.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard says President Bush is "absolutely right" in arguing that developing countries should be included in the global warming treaty. But Howard adds that Australian has no intention of following the U.S. example and abandoning the treaty.

New Zealand's foreign minister is calling on the United States to get to work on the problem "as soon as possible."

"This is a real problem. It has to be addressed," Phil Goff, minister for foreign affairs and trade, told reporters in Washington on Monday as he left a meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell at the State Department. "We would expect the United States to remain involved and to work with the international community to find a solution...to the problem of global warming."

Goff said he was in Washington on behalf of small Pacific island nations, where many people live less than a meter above sea level. They would be among the first to suffer from a rise in water levels caused by global warming.

U.S. business and trade groups want te EU delegation to accept a new direction in climate talks when they resume in July at Bonn, Germany.

"I don't know what they will be able to do," Frank Maisano, a spokesman for the business-oriented Global Climate Coalition said Monday. "We need to find a fresh new breath, and we think the market-based technology approach is the way to do that."

The Kyoto protocol calls for countries to cut heat-trapping emissions by an average 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. However, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have continued to grow since the treaty was signed and are now nearly 15 percent above what they were in 1990.

Many scientists believe such emissions are causing the Earth to warm up significantly; Whitman has said she agrees.

The United Nations said Monday it will host an informal meeting of 40 to 50 environmental ministers in New York on April 21 to prepare for the Bonn talks.